HARMONIA
Urban areas are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. As the share of the world population living in cities continues to increase, so will worsen the impact on the climate and its detrimental effects on the wellbeing of citizens. This gravening situation calls for more resilient environments and urban development strategies. HARMONIA provides tools to predict Climate Change effects
HARMONIA will provide a resilience assessment platform to help urban stakeholders understand and quantify Climate Change effects. Based on satellite and auxiliary data, the HARMONIA platform will offer a user-friendly knowledge base, dispensing detailed information on a local neighborhood and street level. This will support local decision making and foster a wide range of applications dedicated to climate adaptation and mitigation, such as Carbon Capture and Storage technologies
Specifically, HARMONIA will focus on two types of Climate Change (CC) effects:
- Natural and manmade hazards intensified by CC, including urban flooding, soil degradation and geohazards (landslides, earthquake, ground deformation)
- Manmade hazards, such as heat islands, urban heat fluxes, air quality, gas emissions.
Project Harmonia gathers a community of 22 partners, working together to help urban communities manage more efficiently climate change and its effects. This consortium includes 4 Academias, 9 Companies, 4 Research institutes, 1 NGO and 4 pilot cities : Milan (Italy); Sofia (Bulgaria); Piraeus (Grece); and Ixelles (Belgium).
Since its founding in 1827, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm has grown to become one of Europe’s leading technical and engineering universities, as well as a key centre of intellectual talent and innovation. As Sweden’s largest technical research and learning institution, KTH is responsible for one third of Sweden’s capacity for technical and engineering research and is the country’s largest organizer of technical/engineering education at university level. The Division of Geoinformatics at the Department for Urban Planning and Environment, responsible for both research and education within the broad field of geographical information technology (GeoIT) at KTH, is engaged in the HARMONIA project.
In HARMONIA, KTH is leading several tasks including Task 3.5 data annotation, Task4.7 Adaptation of existing & development of innovative AI/ML techniques, and Task 6.1 Risk & Impact Assessment. KTH also participates in other WPs and Tasks.
The HARMONIA project has received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme